Certainly what you describe is actionable – what happens if I offer a ‘buy 2 get 1 free’ package or a ‘buy 1, get 50% of the second book’ discount’. Those are recognizable ‘knobs’ that I can turn to see what it does to the score.

The questions around this just keep popping in my head – like is ‘engagement’ just a web 2.0 word for something else?

Do we need engagement to measure traditional ‘activities’ (like buying a book) or is it something unique to the social media landscape where we are trying to understand how users consume and interact with that landscape?

Is engagement really only about “Social Media”?

Eric defines Engagement as follows:

“Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals.”

If Engagement is something that should only be focused on Social Media how would you re-define it?

Doesn’t buying a product from the site illustrate greater engagement with the goals of the site in offering that product for sale?

I actually look at “Engagement” as more than a single metric but a class of metrics that are a qualitative application of a scale against quantitative metrics to measure performance towards reaching business goals relating to the value of visitor interaction with the business. Engagement in my opinion should measure (as best it can) the level of quality (higher value) interactions with the business whether that interacting happen on the site, off the site or cross channel.

Take the purchasing of books from Eric’s site for example. A user can purchase as many copies of his books as he/she wants and one of Eric’s goals is certainly to sell more books but is the purchase of 2 copies of Web Site Measurement Hacks illustrate more engagement with the content on the part of the User. (You could argue yes her but lets not for simplicity). Eric has 3 books for user to purchase and read so lets say that his goal is that every Visitor to his site buy all three of his books at least once.

So lets set this to a scale by visitor segments:

Segment 1 (S1) = Users who bought 0 books
Segment 2 (S2) = Users who bought 1 book
Segment 3 (S3) = Users who bought 2 books (no duplicate titles)
Segment 4 (S4) = Users who bought all three titles.

Formula:

Visitor Purchase Engagement = (((S1 * 1) + (S2 * 2) + (S3 * 3) + (S4 *4))/Total Users -1)/3 [as a percentage]

0% puchase engagemnet means people aren’t buying books
100% means it is time to order reprints

The more titles you buy the more purchase engagement measured directly against the goal with the understanding that there are only so many distinct book products to buy (or engage in receiving and reading).

The above example is perhaps a bit over simplidfied but the core of how I look at and apply the concept of engagement is there. The way I approach the idea of engagement is to try and break down each business goal to a qualitative scale through segmentation. I then get my overall engagement by averaging all of the goal specific values. It works very nicely trended over time or also for comparison between segments such as the search terms that drive traffic for the site in determining which ones are driving higher value traffic to the site.

-Ian